VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
Vladimir Putin visited Europe’s biggest railway carriage factory yesterday, located in the city of Tver. In 1942 the plant repaired tanks for the Kalinin Front. The enterprise is now experiencing hard times because the Russian Railways Company has reduced orders for carriages (from about a thousand in 2008 to almost half that number today). Employees have been put on a three-day workweek, their wages have dropped, and before long about 20% of the workforce will be laid off.
Extracts from Maurice Druon’s exclusive interview to Izvestia’s Paris correspondent Yuri Kovalenko.
At a meeting with the employees of the Tver Railway Carriage Plant (TVZ), Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised to restructure all of the plant’s loans. “On the way to this meeting I spoke with the head of Sberbank. Soon he will issue instructions to the Tver branch to fully restructure your loan. He will do this today”, said Mr Putin, noting that the directive would cover consumer and mortgage loans taken out by people in the Tver Region, including the plant’s employees.
The former Georgian leader says resignation may be the crucial point in a politician’s career.
“Everybody knows that our land begins with the Kremlin”. It is almost a year since that line from a popular verset became irrelevant for Russian politics. Over the past months people have got used to the idea that while the President was officially the country’s leader real power resided in the Prime Minister’s office. How did the Russian state mechanism, geared to a single boss, react to such a “crumbling of foundations”? How is the country being run on a day-to-day basis? One can find an answer by taking a closer look at the bureaucrats who are sitting inside the Kremlin walls.
Developing infrastructure projects in a difficult economic situation is a sure way out of the crisis. This is an axiom. Prime Minister Putin told a meeting on the development of transport infrastructure in 2009, held in St Petersburg yesterday, that the Government would increase investments in the transport infrastructure by 100 billion roubles (to 550 billion roubles) compared with 2008.
During the past twenty years Europe has travelled a path from Gorbachev-mania to Putin-phobia. These were the opening words at the 20th Berlin Conference of the German economic and financial newspaper Handelsblatt uttered by the noted journalist Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, who had for many years worked as German television’s Channel 1 correspondent in Moscow.
Opening yesterday’s Government Presidium meeting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned that it had some “complicated and unpleasant issues” to discuss. The issues included housing and utilities and air transport.
At the end of March Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the AvtoVAZ car plant and promised it government support in the amount of $3 billion. It was a gesture of unheard-of largesse. When Vladimir Putin was planning his visit to Togliatti he is said to have intended to shell out just 10 billion roubles, and then not in hard cash but in state guarantees of AvtoVAZ future loans (for an enterprise that reports losses obtaining loans in times of crisis is highly problematic). However, the Prime Minister was given a hearty welcome, he liked everything he saw and as an all-powerful man he promised more.
People are not interested to know what Government officials state in their income declarations, but they approve the idea of public disclosure.
An interesting incident happened during Prime Minister Putin’s recent meeting with the representatives of political and non-governmental organisations. The secretary of the Public Chamber, Mr Velikhov, who was one of the first to speak, told the Prime Minister about a recent resolution of the Public Chamber’s plenary session on the topic “The National Economic Strategy in the Context of the World Crisis”. The resolution stressed the importance, in time of crisis, of understanding that the state is an institution of national solidarity. Before giving the floor to the next speaker, Mr Putin commented on Mr Velikhov’s reference to the “need to consolidate society in the face of the threatening crisis today”.
“Toppled regime”: an official end to the counterterrorist operation in Chechnya.
Last Thursday as tens of thousands of protesters on Prospekt Rustaveli were chanting “Misha, Go!”, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was explaining to Newsweek’s Anna Nemtsova that the opposition in Georgia had no chance and that he had never personally insulted Vladimir Putin.
Our correspondent has studied the sales ratings of political literature at three major Moscow bookshops (the Moscow Book House, Biblio-Globus and Moskva) to find out that the vast majority of Russian political bestsellers explain to the public who our country’s foes are and why.
Both Moscow and Baghdad have welcomed the visit to Russia by an Iraqi delegation led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which ended on Saturday. The parties have agreed to promote cooperation in the power and oil industries and in the military field. Nezavisimaya Gazeta has learned that Baghdad is shortly to send a team of experts to Russia to choose the model of helicopter that Iraq would buy.
Last weekend saw protest actions by motorists against the official policy on the import and use of second-hand foreign-made cars. Remembering it was Cosmonauts Day, the protestors recommended President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin going into outer space. The focus of motorists’ protests was again Vladivostok where the participants in an unsanctioned rally were detained by the police.
FRANKFURT-AM-MAIN (GERMANY)
Poverty makes one rich
During the economic downturn the backward Russian regions fall back on the values that are immune to crisis. The price of orders and medals that regional rulers are giving out is the higher the greater the region’s financial dependence on the federal budget. The extremely poor Kalmykia is 90% financed by Moscow while its President decorates foremost individuals with a White Lotus Order made of platinum and adorned with 13 diamonds and 8 rubies…
Vladimir Putin was writing a report but ended up with an address to the Duma.
Russian oil companies have a chance to return to Iraq, as became clear after the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited Moscow. This was the first visit to Russia by the head of the Iraqi Cabinet formed under the country’s constitution adopted in October 2005.
It is nearly ten years since the ailing Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as the head of the Russian Government. This coincided with the start of a spurt of the national economy which was leaving the 1998 crisis behind it and enjoyed the benefits of extraordinarily high energy prices. Although now it is Dmitry Medvedev and not Vladimir Putin who attends international summits and hobnobs with world leaders, they undoubtedly feel that Vladimir Putin is still Russia’s real leader.
